Quotes About Blues

My dad was my first influence. He played classical guitar and my uncle Ron played the blues.

When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle's church, and I started playing there, too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose, and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music - the gospel and blues feel, the soul that's embedded into the more avant-garde records.

The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.

Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.

You don't have to play a whole lot of guitar to be a good blues player. Some people plays too much guitar. Stack it on top of each other the way it don't - you're working too fast. Blues not supposed to be played fast. Blues supposed to be played slow. You could kill a man with just one chord.

The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren't using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn't know what it was. But I found Lightnin' Hopkins.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

If anything, even though I can play in the sort of standard string-bending style, in the B.B. King mold and all of that, I've always had a great interest in the more primitive playing, the open chord playing, rhythm and figures.

When the sweet talkin's done, a man is a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

And as I started reaching deeper I realized that most of the blues of that day was done by men. Women just didn't have the nerve.

When Chuck Berry came along, what he did was more rock & roll than it was blues. It was more exciting. He was like the next step. I thought his first single, 'Maybellene,' was the greatest song in the world.

My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.

I went through a whole blues period in the Nineties, and that had some influence on 'Load' and 'ReLoad.'

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope: I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.

From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.

And when I get on the train I'll cast my blues aside.

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor.

Skipping chases away the blues, and happiness will come chasing after you.

The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences," the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.

Johnson remains the most emotionally committed of all blues singers;

One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.

i play a mean harmonica